Many information processing systems are configured to provide cloud-based compute services to users over a network. In some cases, the compute services utilize so-called serverless applications that do not maintain application state information. Instead, state is kept in external persistent services such as databases and object stores. As a result, recovering a serverless application after a failure or other issue can be problematic under conventional practice. For example, it is often necessary for an administrator or other user to perform manual backups of the application state for a serverless application at multiple points in time in order to permit recovery from those points in time. Such manual backups of serverless applications are complex, time consuming and error prone. In some cases, an administrator or other user may have to coordinate multiple sets of complicated processes to document and track potentially large numbers of changes in versions as well as deployment runtime environments for a variety of distinct components of a serverless application. It is therefore unduly difficult to guarantee successful operational recovery for such applications.